ORTHOEVRA BIRTH CONTROL BLOG

Birth Control Ruling Prescribes Fairness

August 24, 2006

Smart employers will take this week’s Civil Rights Commission ruling to heart and extend prescription coverage to include birth control. But then smart employers probably already do.

The commission’s action is one of basic fairness: If you’re going to cover prescription drugs, don’t discriminate against half of the population based on gender.

Pro-life groups like to make this an issue of religious freedom; they’re against abortion and in some cases against birth control. But birth control pills are used to treat a variety of conditions and improve women’s health even beyond the physical benefits that come from spacing babies a healthy distance apart.

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Besides, employers such as churches, whose primary mission is religion, would be able to get a waiver that frees them from providing the coverage. Organizations that have only some religious component would not. That’s pretty consistent with the history of freedom of religion. You can practice your religion as an individual. You can tailor your work as a fundamentally religious organization. But an employer who shares beliefs with a religious group but engages in other business — lobbying or health care, for instance — is not justified in imposing those beliefs on other people.

Business groups are wailing, too, that this is a health care mandate. No, the nonbinding ruling is a fairness mandate, which shouldn’t be necessary.

Some folks are battering the Civil Rights Commission for overstepping its bounds. But discrimination is a civil rights issue, and those complaints ring of killing the messenger, something that has become too prolific in politics today. The commission’s action is fully consistent with a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission order several years ago and with the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.

It’s hard to believe in 2006 the debate still lingers over whether it’s right to demand that women be afforded comprehensive health care coverage just like men. Smart businesses figured out the right answer a long time ago.

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Of sonograms and schoolbooks

August 20, 2006

Janis Churchey sat at her high school desk, tired and queasy and unable to focus on her teacher. She leaned forward, her expression solemn, to whisper a secret to her girlfriend. She was pregnant.

Kelly Taylor, 15 and feeling alone with her own deep worries, was surprised. She was also suddenly relieved.

At that moment in February 2005, both girls recently recalled, they were in a 10th-grade Life Skills class learning about the disadvantages of having children too young.

Their lesson that day covered the expenses involved in caring for a baby.

Janis had more immediate help to offer her friend. Later that afternoon, as they walked out of Williamsport High, Janis discreetly reached into her purse and handed Kelly something she could use right away: a spare pregnancy test.

What might be most remarkable about their after-school exchange was how unremarkable it was in Washington County. Teen pregnancy has long been a familiar social issue in inner cities and isolated rural communities. But in this increasingly suburban, working-class county in Western Maryland - where public schools stress abstinence and preachers admonish that sex outside marriage is sinful - high school pregnancy and parenthood are commonplace.

Washington County has the highest birth rate for white teens in Maryland. And it ranks fourth in the state for births to girls from 15 to 19, behind only Baltimore and two mostly poor counties on the Eastern Shore.

Over the past 15 years, the adolescent birth rate has dropped by a third across America and slightly more in Maryland. Even big cities such as Baltimore have achieved steep declines by giving out birth control and launching safe-sex campaigns during the AIDS scare.

Here in the shadow of Stone Mountain, though, the number of teenage girls having babies has continued unchecked. In 2004, the last year for which the state has data, 206 high school-age girls gave birth in this county of only 141,895 people. That was three more than in 1991, the national high point for births to unmarried young women.

A combination of cultural factors, some of them related to Washington County’s generally conservative bearing, has contributed to a birth rate so high that schools have been compelled to ban young mothers from bringing in “trophy babies.”

Antipathy to abortion is widespread. Many teenagers are reluctant to obtain birth control - even when it’s free. And parents, says Jacqueline B. Fischer, the school board vice president, oppose teaching “pretty much anything other than abstinence.”

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Yet co-ed sleepovers are popular now, says Maureen Grove, director of Girls Inc., an after-school program in Hagerstown, and even middle schoolers talk knowledgeably about oral sex.

“We’re not acting on the values we’re preaching,” she argues.

In becoming parents, some teenagers are simply following the example of their own mothers and fathers or siblings. They see no reason not to.

In Washington County, where barely 15 percent of the population holds a college degree, schoolgirls don’t always aspire to educational or professional attainment, seeing parenthood as their best option for fulfillment.

“If you have a college scholarship, and your life is mapped out through age 22, you’re not very likely to risk getting pregnant,” says Jennifer Manlove, a national teen pregnancy researcher at Child Trends in Washington.

“There’s not the same ambivalence that shows up in less affluent communities,” she adds, “where they don’t really want to get pregnant, but they’re just not as motivated to prevent it.”

The stigma once associated with out-of-wedlock pregnancies and single parenthood has almost vanished in this region of rolling farmland and old factory towns. High school pregnancies, a sure-fire route to shotgun marriages less than a half-century ago, are now openly celebrated.

“I thought it was the cool thing to do,” Sarah Cabral, a former Williamsport High student, wrote in a March letter to the Hagerstown Herald-Mail.

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State clinics running low on birth control supplies

August 15, 2006

Family planning clinics in West Virginia can weather for now the drought of birth control pills and patches with their in-house stocks, but some nurses and administrators say their clinics can only hold on for the next month or so.

Some clinics serve as a county’s only source of free contraceptives to low-income men and women. And clinics in Monongalia County face a rush of students when classes at West Virginia University start next week.

“As of now, we’re OK for another month, but when we place the next order, it’s anybody’s guess,� said Connie Mollohan, the nurse at the Braxton County Health Department in Sutton, that county’s only family planning clinic.

The Braxton health department receives birth control through West Virginia Family Planning, a state agency that provides free birth control through independent clinics in the state.

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The bulk of the agency’s supply took a hit July 1 after top supplier Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceuticals Inc. drastically raised the prices for its products without warning. In some cases, birth-control pills that had cost a penny for a 30-day supply jumped to more than $20.

The prices forced West Virginia Family Planning and many similar agencies across the country to stop buying Ortho-McNeil’s products, leaving clinics low on birth control.

The company says the price increase reflects federal pricing formulas, but family planning advocates say Ortho-McNeil can make the price as low as it likes.

West Virginia Family Planning relied on Ortho-McNeil for 75 percent of its birth-control pill supply. The company also is the only manufacturer of the birth-control patch and thus the sole provider to West Virginia and other states.

As of Monday, West Virginia Family Planning had only 600 patches left and was completely out of four types of birth-control pills, according to program Director Denise Smith. Condoms and birth-control shots were not affected by the price increase.

“When we can’t supply birth control to our population, it definitely would be� a crisis, said Barbara Cooper, the clinic nurse at the Minnie Hamilton Clinic in Calhoun County, the county’s only clinic associated with the Family Planning agency.

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Peterson & Associates, P.C. Continues Its Investigation of Ortho Evra Related Injuries After a Division of Johnson & Johnson, JNJ, Issues a New Warning

August 14, 2006

Peterson & Associates, P.C. announces that it is continuing to investigate claims involving the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch. Recently, Peterson & Associates, P.C. filed three lawsuits on behalf of three women who claimed to be injured by the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch naming Johnson & Johnson, Inc. and Ortho McNeil Pharmaceutical as Defendants. The maker of the drug, Ortho McNeil Pharamceutical, a division of Johnson & Johnson, warns that the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch may cause an increased risk of blood clot related injuries such as heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli and deep vein thrombosis (DVT).

On November 10, 2005, Ortho McNeil and the FDA issued a warning about the increased risks of blood clots associated with using the Ortho Evra(r) Patch. In the new warning, Ortho McNeil admitted that women who use the Ortho Evra(r) Patch are exposed to up to 60% more estrogen than women who use the birth control pill. The FDA announcement can be found In 2001, when Ortho Evra(r) was first put on the market, Ortho McNeil represented that women on the patch are exposed to the same amount of estrogen as those who take the birth control pill.

The Ortho Evra(r) Patch is an adhesive, transdermal birth control patch that is worn on a woman’s arm, abdomen, torso or buttocks. It is intended to administer 150 mcg of norelgestromin and 20 mcg of ethinyl estradiol into the bloodstream per 24 hours. The patch is worn for one week and then replaced. No patch is worn in the fourth week during menstruation. Over 4 million women have used the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch.

It is alleged that Ortho McNeil and its parent company Johnson & Johnson were aware of the increased medical risks associated with Ortho Evra(r) before the drug was approved by the FDA. It is also alleged that even after the drug was approved, both companies failed to adequately warn patients about the risks. Evidence allegedly shows that the risk of developing blood clots and injuries caused by them (such as strokes), is significantly higher using the Ortho Evra(r) Patch versus the birth control pill.

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The FDA logged 9,116 reports of adverse reactions to Ortho Evra(r) in the seventeen month period from April 2002 through September 2003. By way of comparison, the leading oral contraceptive, Ortho Tri-Cyclen(r) (which has six times as many users as Ortho Evra(r)), only generated 1,237 adverse event reports to the FDA during the six year period from November 1997 through September 2003.

One of the lawsuits filed by Peterson & Associates, P.C on behalf of a 46-year-old woman who suffered a stroke after using the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch for only three months, alleges that Johnson & Johnson and Ortho McNeil failed to adequately warn the woman of the risks associated with the patch. A second lawsuit filed is on behalf of a 20-year-old woman who suffered a pulmonary embolism after being on the patch for only six months.

A third lawsuit filed by Peterson & Associates, P.C. alleges that the death of a 27-year-old woman was caused by the Ortho Evra(r) Birth Control Patch. The suit was brought by the woman’s mother who is seeking damages from Johnson & Johnson to support the woman’s two young children.

“It is a real tragedy what has happened to these three women, and to countless women throughout the country who have suffered injuries while on the Ortho Evra(r) Patch,” David M. Peterson, president of Peterson & Associates, P.C stated after filing the lawsuits in New Jersey Court.

If you or someone you know has experienced blood clots such as heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary emboli or deep vein thrombosis while using the Ortho Evra Birth Control patch.

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Woman Claims Her Birth Control Nearly Killed Her

August 10, 2006

An eastern Kentucky woman says her birth control nearly killed her.

Now she’s suing a major pharmaceutical company.

The Johnson County woman believes they are at fault.

One year ago, Tonya Dingess was leaving the hospital after she says she nearly died.

“I was in excruciating pain,” Dingess said.

She says the pain was in her stomach, legs and chest, and for weeks doctors didn’t know what was wrong. Turns out, she had blood clots all over her body.

“It was most likely related to the patch I had been wearing,” Dingess said.

Dingess says a month before she got sick, she switched from birth control pills to a patch, but no one told her about the potential deadly side effects.

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“I wasn’t made aware of it. Nobody ever told me that people were dying from this at a staggering rate,” Dingess said.

She is now suing the patch maker, Ortho Evra and the parent company, Johnson and Johnson.

“We believe they knew it was six times higher rate of stroke, heart attack, and blood clot and they kept it from the public,” Attorney John Kirk said.

An Ortho Evra spokesperson says they don’t comment on ongoing litigation.

The company’s website says they don’t know if birth control’s serious side effects are different with the patch.

Dingess says her lawsuit isn’t about money, but about letting other women know about what she calls the deadly risks.

She says she’s just happy to be alive to tell her story.

Attorney John Kirk says there have been several other lawsuits filed relating to the patch, but he thinks this is the first one in Kentucky.

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Birth Control Price Hike Affects Family Planning Clinics

August 7, 2006

Family Planning Clinics across the country are scrambling to continue providing birth control pills to low-income residents, after a major supplier drastically raised prices last month.
Pharmaceutical company Ortho-McNeil used to charge public health services pennies for one type of birth control pills.
That same one-month supply now costs North Dakota programs over $15.00 dollars, and over $21.00 in other states.

“This was without prior information,” says North Dakota Family Planning Program Director Deb Arnold. “It came as quite a surprise to all of us.”

Ortho-McNeil provides 70 percent of the state program`s oral contraceptives.
The company raised the price of 7 of 9 birth control pills and nearly doubled the price of the patch, Ortho-Evra.

The state family planning program serves nearly 15,000 women. Most live below the poverty line. Nearly half have no insurance.
Ortho-McNeil released this statement:

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“…Our products are readily available at the lowest cost available and are comparatively priced with other hormonal contraceptive options.”

The statement continues to say that almost all of the company`s products are available in generic form.
But Arnold says, generic prices are still considerably higher than what Ortho-McNeil used to offer.

“We might have to limit our services in order to keep the doors open to people who cannot afford them,” she says.
“Their corporate decision is very disappointing. We`re hoping they will reconsider.”

In the mean time the state program can no longer afford Ortho-McNeil and is negotiating with makers of the generic brand.

Ortho-McNeil`s price increase does not affect condoms or birth control shots. When used correctly condoms are shown to be less effective at preventing pregnancy than hormone-based pills, patches and shots.

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Birth control

August 2, 2006

A birth control manufacturer has thrown the state’s public health officials into a tailspin as they try to find enough pills and patches for low-income West Virginians.

Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical, maker of birth control pills and the Ortho-Evra patch, will no longer sell 30-day packages of pills to the state for a penny apiece. Instead, the company wants $21.01. The patch’s cost will rise from $12.15 to $22.46.

So far, company officials have said only that they are charging the maximum the federal government allows. True, but the firm did not always charge the maximum. Why the change?

Even with all the obscene profiteering in the pharmaceutical industry, it is conceivable that the company might have a good reason for raising its prices for taxpayer-funded public health programs. Fine, but why a hike that is shattering the state’s budget?

“They should be ashamed of themselves for raising their product prices to a level they know the public health system can’t handle,� said Marilyn Keefe, vice president for public policy at the National Family Planning Reproductive Health Association in Washington.

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West Virginia has used the bargain that Ortho-McNeil has given the state for years to help thousands of low-income women avoid unwanted pregnancies. Indirectly, this has reduced the number of abortions.

We urge Ortho-McNeil to rethink this unpopular price upsurge.

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